My earlier post about Roku and Android devices unable to play audio from tv broadcasts is likely due them to not wanting to pay the license to Dolby for Ac3. This is an example of how a lot of manufacturers can cut corners. Apple Tvs are not ad subsidized and compared to many other devices, the newest models can be expensive , start at $129.
But that’s not the end of the story. Apple TVs are actually some of cheapest devices you can run this service on. LocalTV+ will run on any AppleTV released in the last 9 years. If it is an AppleTV 4th gen, it will work. This is a frequent question I see on reddit, “What do I need to buy to use this service?”. There is a simple rule of thumb, if it is newer than 2015, it’s one that has an App Store and you can download LocalTV+. In general we try to keep our OS requirements as low as we can but the interesting thing about AppleTV is Apple continues to support even the 9 year old models with the latest OS updates. When I look at the stats for our app downloads in the App Store, I see the 100% of devices are on iOS 17 and up. In fact only one download was on iOS 17 and 99% were on tvOS 18.
So how cheap are older devices? When you search eBay for Apple TV 4th gen, the cheapest devices go for around $30. All of these should run LocalTV+ perfectly fine. Regardless of what Apple does, we will keep our requirements as low as possible. We are lucky right now that all AppleTV run the latest version of the OS. This makes our own development and testing much easier.